USING IRONPDF

Create a PDF File with Blazor Tutorial

Updated February 11, 2024

IronPDF, a renowned C# library, works with Blazor applications. This review will guide you through using IronPDF to embed a PDF report in a Blazor application, showcasing its seamless integration and effectiveness.

How to Create a PDF File in Blazor

Create a new Blazor Project in Visual Studio
Install the HTML-to-PDF Library for Blazor Applications
Create PDF documents from web pages by URL
Create PDF documents from HTML strings

1. IronPDF Features

Developers can quickly create, read, and process a PDF document with the help of the robust IronPDF .NET PDF library. IronPDF has a built-in Chrome engine and offers a wealth of practical and potent capabilities. These include the ability to convert HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, and images to PDF, the ability to add unique headers and footers to PDF documents, and the ability to produce PDFs precisely as they appear in a web browser. IronPDF supports various web technologies, including HTML, ASPX, Razor Pages, and MVC frameworks.

IronPDF's key attributes are as follows:

IronPDF offers full control over the creation and modification of PDF files within .NET C# applications
IronPDF can generate PDF files of web pages from their URLs using specific User-Agent, Proxy, Header, and Cookie configurations.
IronPDF can generate PDF files for web pages located behind login forms using form variables
IronPDF can extract and/or remove photos from pre-existing PDF files
IronPDF can add text, photos, bookmarks, watermarks, and other elements to PDF documents
IronPDF makes it easy to merge and split pages of one or more PDF documents.
IronPDF can process web page assets such as JavaScript, CSS, and media files and render them into PDF documents just as they would appear in a browser.
IronPDF supports all .NET Frameworks, including .NET Core, .NET Standard, etc.

2. What is Blazor?

Blazor is a Web Application Framework that makes it feasible to create client-side Web Applications in C# and HTML using Web Assembly.

Web Assembly apps are sent to the browser in a binary instruction format that can operate at close-to-native speed. This has created new potential for languages like C# to run inside the browser.

Creating a New Project in Visual Studio

To begin, open the Microsoft Visual Studio application and select "New Project" from the File menu. Then, select "Blazor Server App".

Create a PDF File with Blazor Tutorial, Figure 1: Creating a New Project in Visual Studio Creating a New Project in Visual Studio

Enter a project name and select a file path. Then, click the Create button.

Create a PDF File with Blazor Tutorial, Figure 2: Choosing the name and location of the new Blazor Application Choosing the name and location of the new Blazor Application

Select the desired .NET Framework (we will use .NET 6.0 in this tutorial), as shown in the screenshot below:

Create a PDF File with Blazor Tutorial, Figure 3: Creating a New Project in Visual Studio with the .NET 6.0 Framework Creating a New Project in Visual Studio with the .NET 6.0 Framework

Microsoft Visual Studio will now generate the structure for this Blazor application.

Next, add the IronPDF library to this new project.

3. Install the IronPDF Library

The IronPDF Library can be downloaded and installed in four ways:

Using Visual Studio's NuGet Package Manager
Using Visual Studio's Command-Line
Downloading directly from the NuGet website
Downloading directly from the IronPDF website

3.1 Using Visual Studio's NuGet Package Manager

Visual Studio provides the NuGet Package Manager to assist in installing libraries directly into projects. The screenshot below shows how to open the NuGet Package Manager.

Create a PDF File with Blazor Tutorial, Figure 4: Accessing Visual Studio's NuGet Package Manager Accessing Visual Studio's NuGet Package Manager

Use the search field under the Browse tab to search for "IronPDF", as shown in the screenshot below:

Create a PDF File with Blazor Tutorial, Figure 5: Searching for the IronPDF library in the NuGet Package Manager GUI Searching for the IronPDF library in the NuGet Package Manager GUI

In the image above, it shows the list of the related search results. Select the required options to install the package into your project.

3.2 Using Visual Studio Command-Line

In Visual Studio, go to Tools > NuGet Package Manager > Package Manager Console

Enter the following line into the Package Manager Console tab:

Install-Package IronPdf

The package will now be downloaded and installed in the current project.

Create a PDF File with Blazor Tutorial, Figure 6: Installing the IronPDF library using the NuGet Package Manager Console Installing the IronPDF library using the NuGet Package Manager Console

3.3 Downloading Directly from the NuGet Website

The third way to install the IronPDF library is to download the NuGet package directly from the website.

Navigate to NuGet website for IronPDF.

Click the "Download Package" option from the menu on the right-hand side.
Open the downloaded package on your file system. It will be installed automatically.
Reload the solution and start using it in your project.

3.4 Downloading Directly from the IronPDF Website

Visit the IronPDF website to download the IronPDF package directly.

After downloading, follow these steps to add the package to your project:

Right-click the project from the solution window.
Select the option "Reference" and then navigate to the location of the library that you downloaded previously.
Click OK to add the library as a reference.

4. Create PDF documents in the Blazor Server App

The Blazor app in this tutorial will use IronPDF to fetch a web page's HTML content by its URL and convert it into a PDF document.

Enter the following source code in the .razor file contained in the project.

@using IronPdf;

public void ExportData()
{
    try
    {
        string fileName = "Demo.pdf";
        var renderer = new IronPdf.ChromePdfRenderer();
        var pdf = renderer.RenderUrlAsPdf("https://localhost:7018/fetchdata");
        JSRuntime.InvokeVoidAsync("saveAsFile", fileName, Convert.ToBase64String(pdf.Stream.ToArray()));
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {

    }
}

@using IronPdf;

public void ExportData()
{
    try
    {
        string fileName = "Demo.pdf";
        var renderer = new IronPdf.ChromePdfRenderer();
        var pdf = renderer.RenderUrlAsPdf("https://localhost:7018/fetchdata");
        JSRuntime.InvokeVoidAsync("saveAsFile", fileName, Convert.ToBase64String(pdf.Stream.ToArray()));
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {

    }
}

Private IronPdf As [using]

Public Sub ExportData()
	Try
		Dim fileName As String = "Demo.pdf"
		Dim renderer = New IronPdf.ChromePdfRenderer()
		Dim pdf = renderer.RenderUrlAsPdf("https://localhost:7018/fetchdata")
		JSRuntime.InvokeVoidAsync("saveAsFile", fileName, Convert.ToBase64String(pdf.Stream.ToArray()))
	Catch ex As Exception

	End Try
End Sub

VB C#

The code snippet above uses two methods to generate PDF documents from HTML. The first one is IronPDF's RenderUrlAsPdf method, which downloads the HTML content from a given URL and converts it into a PDF format.

The second method is the static JSRuntime.InvokeVoidAsync method, which triggers a browser's JavaScript engine to invoke a JavaScript function within the scope of the web page that saves the PDF content to a file on the client's file system.

This JavaScript function is included below:

<script type="text/JavaScript">
    function saveAsFile(filename, bytesBase64) {
        if (navigator.msSaveBlob) {
            //Download document in Edge browser
            var data = window.atob(bytesBase64);
            var bytes = new Uint8Array(data.length);
            for (var i = 0; i < data.length; i++) {
                bytes[i] = data.charCodeAt(i);
            }
            var blob = new Blob([bytes.buffer], { type: "application/octet-stream" });
            navigator.msSaveBlob(blob, filename);
            window.navigator.msSaveOrOpenBlob(blob);
        }
        else {
            var link = document.createElement('a');
            link.download = filename;
            link.href = "data:application/octet-stream;base64," + bytesBase64;
            document.body.appendChild(link); // Needed for Firefox
            link.click();
            document.body.removeChild(link);
        }
    }
</script>

<script type="text/JavaScript">
    function saveAsFile(filename, bytesBase64) {
        if (navigator.msSaveBlob) {
            //Download document in Edge browser
            var data = window.atob(bytesBase64);
            var bytes = new Uint8Array(data.length);
            for (var i = 0; i < data.length; i++) {
                bytes[i] = data.charCodeAt(i);
            }
            var blob = new Blob([bytes.buffer], { type: "application/octet-stream" });
            navigator.msSaveBlob(blob, filename);
            window.navigator.msSaveOrOpenBlob(blob);
        }
        else {
            var link = document.createElement('a');
            link.download = filename;
            link.href = "data:application/octet-stream;base64," + bytesBase64;
            document.body.appendChild(link); // Needed for Firefox
            link.click();
            document.body.removeChild(link);
        }
    }
</script>

HTML

The JavaScript function above receives the Base64 data from Blazor and converts it into a blob before saving it to the client-side location.

Alternatively, The SaveAs method from the ChromePdfRenderer class can also be used to save PDF documents to the browser's local storage.

5. Create a PDF Document from an HTML String

The following snippet of code shows how to turn an HTML string into a document.

var pdf = new IronPdf.ChromePdfRenderer().RenderHtmlAsPdf("<h1>Hello world!!</h1>")

var pdf = new IronPdf.ChromePdfRenderer().RenderHtmlAsPdf("<h1>Hello world!!</h1>")

'INSTANT VB TODO TASK: The following line uses invalid syntax:
'var pdf = New IronPdf.ChromePdfRenderer().RenderHtmlAsPdf("<h1>Hello world!!</h1>")

VB C#

The preceding example uses the RenderHtmlAsPdf instance method to transform any string of HTML into PDF content. Furthermore, the SaveAs method can be used in the procedures described previously to save this content on the client's computer.

Create a PDF File with Blazor Tutorial, Figure 7: The Blazor PDF Generation Application created in this tutorial The Blazor PDF Generation Application created in this tutorial

The screenshot above shows the Web Application that developed in this tutorial. Clicking on the Download button will trigger the C# code to produce the PDF content, and a JavaScript function to download the PDF content on the client-side.